How to Choose the Best Duplicate Photo Finder for Mac
Apple computers are great - they’re fast, you don’t need to pay for OS upgrades, and they come bundled up with lots of cool software. There’s iTunes to manage your music, Preview to work with PDFs, and Photos to organize your photo albums. While Photos is a magnificent photo organizer, it can’t help you to find and remove duplicate and similar shots from your albums. These duplicates and similars are space-wasters, so you really should download a duplicate photo finder for Mac if you want to have a neatly organized photo collection.
Where to Find a Mac Duplicate Photo Finder
The obvious place for a Mac user to look for apps is the Mac App Store - just search for “duplicate photo finder mac”. You’ll get quite a few results but keep in mind that not all great Mac apps get posted on the App Store. That’s why a Google search or a search on a site like MacUpdate might return better results and provide you with more choice. You will be able to compare all available duplicate image finder Mac apps available for download and choose the one that suits you best.
Must-Have Mac Duplicate Photo Finder Features
The trick to finding the best duplicate photo finder for your Apple computer is to choose an app that has all the right features. There are programs that can only find duplicate photos based on file names. Other apps detect duplicates by content but can only find exact copies of an image saved in the same format as the original. These duplicate finders are OK if you want to perform a quick cleanup but they won’t really help you to manage and organize your albums. If you want a duplicate photo finder for Mac that you can use to find, remove and manage both duplicate and similar photos across different formats, then here are the features you should look for:
Customizable similarity threshold - a top-range duplicate image finder should have a way for you to customize the similarity threshold. This will let you easily find duplicates as well as photos of the same subject. Duplicate Photo Cleaner has a similarity threshold you can set anywhere from 20% to 100%. While putting the slider to 20% will give you very general results, setting it to 100% will return only true duplicates. If you want to find both duplicate and similar photos, set it to anywhere between 50% and 85%. The greater the similarity value, the fewer results the scan will return.
Versatile scan modes - most duplicate photo finders for Mac have only one scan mode that does a very basic job. If you have a large photo library, use Mac Photos or Adobe Lightroom to manage and post-process your shots, then you need a duplicate finder that can integrate with these apps. Duplicate Photo Cleaner has nine scan modes: Standard Scan for everyday duplicate photo management, Same Subject Scan for finding photos of the same subject and sorting them into groups, Sector Detail Scan for finding elements from one photo in your other shots, Folder Comparison Scan for comparing images in two or more folders, Photos Scan to find duplicate and similar shots in the Photos app, Adobe Lightroom Scan to manage duplicates in Lightroom catalogs, and modes for Picasa, Corel PaintPro, and iPhoto.
Detailed preview and comparison - a duplicate photo finder would be useless without comprehensive preview options. Duplicate Photo Cleaner has four different view modes: Multiviewer group and list views, Table view, and Tree view. The Multiviewer is great for comparing images at a glance, while the Table and Tree views offer more details about each photo and its location on your Mac.
Bulk selection - when you have a large photo collection, you’ll spend a long time selecting the duplicates you want to delete or move unless the duplicate finder app you’re using has extensive bulk selection options. Ideally, you’d want to be able to select all duplicates in one go. And if you want to keep specific files, options to select the smallest or the largest files, or high- or low-resolution images, will be handy. Duplicate Photo Cleaner has all these options.
One-click duplicate management - you should be able to delete, move, or replace duplicates with a link to the original image in one click.
Support for all popular image formats - ideally, the duplicate image finder you choose should support all popular formats and codecs.
In addition to all of the above-mentioned features, it’s important to choose a duplicate photo finder for Mac that’s updated on a regular basis. You don’t want to risk having compatibility issues with your OS X simply because an app you use isn’t updated as often as it should be.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to finding a good app to manage duplicate and similar photos on your Mac than downloading the first result you get on the app store. Choose well and organizing your photos will become a lot easier and more efficient.
